CHAPTER 18

Time passed differently in the cavern. The only way Vax could measure time was by the brightening and dimming of the glass spheres used as magical light sources that were set to emulate the sunlight outside—an old miner’s trick, Thorn had called it with a smirk—and by Sencha’s continued healings.

Vax’s fingers twitched with the need to do something. Stand watch. Hide and stealth away. Start a fight. Find his sister. Let the Clasp know he was still toeing the line. Find a way to steal a ring and the miners’ homes back.

The miners went about their days as much as possible, setting watches near the surface and carrying pickaxes and shovels deep into the mine, away from the dangerous surface. The mine might not officially be in operation, like Sencha had said, but the miners kept digging. They were obviously used to going without light and air around them, but he became increasingly agitated. He felt useless and conflicted, especially once his back healed. He missed rooftops and endless skies. He missed the rumor and opportunity of cities—even if those chances led to terrible decisions. He missed being able to go unseen, because every move he made in this cavern was observed by someone. And above all things, he missed Vex.

It was a bone-deep restlessness at first. The idea that she should be near or that he should be looking for her. Even at night, someone held a watch near the fire, and Vax didn’t have a clue how to find his way out of the mines. As soon as he wandered toward the entrance, someone always followed him. The only thing he could do was to remind himself that Vex could take care of herself, and that she would know to keep her head down and stay away from the Shademaster. He had to remind himself that whatever information he gathered here could only help them, and he would find his way back to her as soon as he was able.

So when two of the trio of halflings disappeared deeper into the mines with Thorn and the third—a brown-haired, flat-nosed gem cutter’s apprentice called Felric—invited him for a game of cards after breakfast, he jumped at the opportunity to mine the miners for information.

The game they played wasn’t one he’d ever played before, but the rules were easy enough to pick up and Felric was a talkative player. “We all lived outside of Jorenn, near the mines. Silver mines, too. There were troubles, of course, before the Shadewatch. The laws only applied to those who wanted to hold to them, and strange creatures often came down from the hills. We protected each other as best we could. We were all we had. There’s a difference, see, between townspeople and miners. Folk in town were terrified of the hills. We know how to live with dangers. There’re all sorts of creatures in the deep.”

“So what happened?” Vax asked.

Discomfort rolled across Felric’s face. “Shadewatch came and kicked us out, didn’t they?” He played his hand. “Claimed we endangered the town by digging too deep. Claimed the mines ought to belong to the town, and they should be the ones organizing the mining now. I don’t think the townsfolk understood that the silver we found was for the good of all. We kept what we needed and nothing more. Everything else went to Jorenn’s council of elders. But the Shadewatch wanted more. Said the town had a right to all and we were outlaws.”

Vax hesitated before taking a card from the stack. “Did you? Dig too deep?”

“The Shadewatch claimed we’re responsible for the ash walkers.” Felric’s mouth worked, but he didn’t elaborate. He discarded his hand, barely paying attention to what Vax was doing. “That’s why they needed to be in charge of the mines.”

“Were you?” Vax pressed, feeling the words like claws across his back.

Felric shuffled his cards and looked away. “They destroyed our homes and cut down everyone who resisted.” A shadow haunted his expression, and his shoulders twitched. “We barely escaped with our lives.”

It wasn’t an answer, but it was clear Felric didn’t want to continue this line of conversation.

Still. “And the Shademaster … she was there?” Vax asked, purposefully playing a terrible hand to keep Felric in the game.

“There?” the halfling scoffed. “She led the first charge. She’s the one who ran Anissa—Thorn’s sister—through, and Thorn saw it happen.” He pressed the spot between his eyes and threw his cards down in front of him. Without another word, he stalked toward the other side of the cavern, where he remained until one of the other halflings came to collect Felric for an assignment in one of the tunnels. Vax didn’t miss the fact that they all wore a layer of gray dust and that they didn’t seem thrilled by his attention.

He winced. Were they responsible for the ash walkers, and was the smuggling a story they told themselves? Were they still responsible?

Vax glanced around the cavern, at the small community in front of him. With every day that passed, he felt more in over his head. He shuffled the cards before he got up and walked toward the entrance. Immediately one of the elderly dwarves got to his feet too, a frown on his face. Vax might be able to take one—even a few—of them, but the message was clear. They’d stop him from leaving and—accidentally or otherwise—betraying their location. So he turned back and spent the afternoon going through sets of dagger practices, to the delight of the children in the cavern, two of whom stood at a distance and tried to emulate his movements with wooden spoons. Thorn, who wandered in and out of the tunnels, stayed to watch for a few minutes too. Vax noticed the half-elf’s presence wherever he went. Thorn’s glances were as sharp as his words.

Vax kept going until he tried to twist his daggers and spin around, and instead the world twisted and spun around him. After that, he cautiously sat down next to the tall female half-orc, who had spent the morning in the tunnels and was now once again bent over her book, wearing her glasses. Vax had heard enough to gather that the woman, who went by the name of Tinyn, was Thorn’s second-in-command and by far the more levelheaded of the two.

Vax stared at the book. The cover bore no title, and the text was written in a language he didn’t recognize.

When he looked up, Tinyn stared back at him suspiciously. “What do you want?”

Vax shrugged and studied his nails. “What was in those messages you lost in the camp?” He’d already tried getting more details from Thorn, but it couldn’t hurt to try it again.

Tinyn guffawed. “You’re bloody mad if you think I’ll answer that.” She slapped the book shut, and took Vax in as if she were seeing him for the first time. Her expression was calculating but closed off.

“Fine then.” Vax shifted backward. “Did the Shadewatch take them?”

“No, the ashen dead are ferocious readers.”

“Where will you go if you get out of here?” Because there had to be another plan than just revenge.

Tinyn looked at Vax as though he spoke a different language, and with something that almost resembled pity. “Simple. We go wherever Thorn does.”

She pocketed the book and got to her feet, leaving Vax on his own with a sharp nod. The unspoken message was abundantly clear. They tolerated him. They would take care of him. But he was an outsider, and they didn’t trust him. Thorn didn’t trust him, and everything always came back to Thorn.

With nothing left to ward it off, Vax’s restlessness and loneliness turned into an ache sharper than the wounds across his back. Vex and he had never been separated this long before, never longer than hours. It felt like missing a part of himself, like his heartbeat was only half of what it should be, and he’d been disconnected from the one person who anchored him. If he stayed here any longer, he’d become one of the many with a ghost by his side.

But aside from not knowing his way around, what stopped him from sneaking out once his back felt better was the fact that he couldn’t. They’d saved his life at the cost of another, and it weighed on him. He owed them a life and a death.

He owed them a better understanding of what had happened. With the miners. With the Shadewatch. With Jorenn.

If he understood, once he got Vex back, he could find his own way toward stealing the proof the miners needed. Between that and the ring, they could settle two debts and be back to their own lives in no time.

Maybe if he kept telling himself that often enough, he’d be able to believe it.

THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, AS THE cavern around him grew colder, Vax sagged down on one of the cots, near where Sencha was minding a dwarven woman with a bad leg, and observed the ministrations. The healer was as gentle-but-firm with the woman as she’d been with him, and she didn’t make a distinction between him and the miners. Her careful aid consisted primarily of poultices and bandages, in addition to the healing she could manage with the All-Hammer’s blessing.

“Does it still help to heal?” he asked when the woman disappeared back into the tunnels. Hers wasn’t a recent injury, but seemed to be a permanent one.

Sencha cleaned up her equipment and tucked the necklace with the copper hammer back under her shirt. “It eases her pain some. That’s worth it. Especially when no one else gets in trouble and demands my attention.” She raised her eyebrows at him, and he grinned back.

She gestured him to turn around and brusquely checked his bandages. It had taken the better part of three days for her to reach a point where she was hesitantly satisfied with his progress. His wounds had closed and didn’t open anymore.

“The wounds are doing better,” he said. “I barely feel a thing anymore.”

“And you wouldn’t tell me if they weren’t,” she replied, running her hands over the newly healed skin.

“Probably not,” he admitted.

“Don’t play me for a fool. Stubborn boys, all of you.”

He had a vague inkling she wasn’t just talking about him or Thorn. He hesitated. “I’m sorry about Emryn.”

“I am too.” Sencha tilted up her chin, and her voice held an edge of warning to it. “I’m sorry I couldn’t find a way to take care of both of you. He was a good lad, and he did a good thing, getting you out of that fray.”

He clamped his mouth shut. Thorn’s insistence that he shouldn’t feel guilty still lingered. Perhaps he had no right to feel guilty, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t.

Sencha placed a warm hand against his back, and he felt tension ripple underneath her touch. “If you want to be angry at someone, be angry at the walkers that attacked him or the Shademaster who drove us here,” she said firmly, taking a step back from him so he could straighten his shirt. “Anything else will only endanger us.”

He balled his fists. He had plenty of experience with feeling both anger and guilt at the same time. “What do you mean?”

“What will you do if I tell you that you should feel guilty? Go charging out to try to fix what happened? It will kill us before it kills you.” She sat down on one of the cots. Despite her hunched shoulders and her tired eyes, the look she threw him was one of steel and determination. He wondered how often she’d had to tell Thorn the same thing. “You have a sister to go back to, and a life to lead. Keep your focus on that. When we find a way to safely get you out of here—leave. Don’t let yourself be distracted by hopeless cases.”

Her words threw him. They were hardly hopeless when they were surviving. Everywhere he looked he saw resilience.

“Can you at least tell me about Jorenn? What it was like before the Shadewatch came?”

“Think I’m old enough to know, do you?” she demanded, a teasing note worming its way back into her voice. She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and used it to dab her face, and she chuckled when he blushed uncomfortably. She patted the blankets next to her and didn’t send him away. “I will tell you what this town once was.” Her voice dropped. “Perhaps then you’ll understand why it’s better to leave.”

She didn’t speak immediately. She was sitting on the cot and although her face was turned toward him, Vax knew her thoughts were miles and years away.

“Jorenn is a hard place. Always has been. We lived our life surrounded by dangers and disregard. Dangers from the hills and the valleys. Disregard from the rest of the continent. People only ever came this way when they were down on their luck or simply desperate. Foolish adventurers with wandering feet who thought the hills held great riches for them, when for most they only held certain death. But we lived. We found ways to survive, and when we found our way into the mines, both surviving and living became easier.”

Vax swallowed hard, the words eerily similar to ones he’d heard a long time ago. A lifetime ago.

“Turns out there was wealth in the mines. Silver ore, like I told you, and pure silver as well. We went from a small community where everyone knew each other—no matter if they lived above- or underground—to what those fools in power considered thriving. We were a town full of opportunity, and it attracted all sorts of folk. Outsiders, who wanted us to exhaust the mines, because coin bought influence. Strangers, who didn’t understand the way of us, but who forced us to change regardless. We were a good town, once upon a time. We made our lives between the hills and the valleys, and we needed only the homes of our families, the craft of our own hands, and the songs we sang around the fire. We were happy.”

“Until the Shademaster came?”

Sencha shook her head. “She wasn’t the first, but she was the first to convince the majority of the people in town to believe in her. Her influence only increased when the ash walker attacks escalated. She promised the townsfolk wealth and safety from danger, and she cut herself a decent profit with the power their trust gave her.”

Vax mulled it over. “Did she lie to them?”

“No. She didn’t lie to the people who believed in her, not precisely. She kept them safe, at the expense of our lives and our homes.”

“Were you responsible for the ash walkers?”

She snorted but didn’t seem offended. “Asking the hard questions, are you?” She sighed. “Would it change anything for you if I said we were? That it’s a risk we have to take if we want to be able to mine in these hills?”

Vax tensed. If they were responsible for those rotting corpses, it meant they only saved his life from a danger they caused. It meant they were as much responsible for danger and destruction as the Shadewatch were. But did that mean they deserved to be hunted down and killed, like Thorn said happened? “I don’t know,” he said, honestly. “Are you still mining?”

“Creatures came down from the hills before, and up from the deep as well. It’s possible that our miners unleashed them. If we did, the danger was ours. We’ve always been the ones who died first.” It wasn’t an answer exactly, and Sencha’s words held a note of warning. “Even when the Shademaster found that magic ring of hers, she only ever protected the town. Raised up barriers and warded off the ash walkers from her people. She may do right by them, but she needed to get rid of us.”

“Her magic ring?” Vax repeated weakly, distracted from the tales of slaughter. He’d worried about asking any of the miners about it directly. When he got out of here, when he managed to steal the bloody thing, he didn’t want to be tied to it directly.

“Cloudy thing. Fracture, she calls it.”

He faltered but immediately schooled his face into bland curiosity. “She uses it?”

“What else is she supposed to do with it?” Sencha scoffed. “It’s pretty enough, but Jorenn doesn’t have many fancy occasions for dressing up. Though perhaps she wishes to look rich when she meets with her smugglers. That’s always an option, I suppose.”

Vax stored the information away and met Sencha’s frown with a shrug of his own. “I heard rumors about an heirloom. I didn’t realize it was magic. Pieces like that usually come with good stories.”

She sniffed, but he could see the grief in her eyes. “If it’s a happily ever after you’re looking for, you won’t find one in Jorenn.”

A commotion near the entrance caused them both to turn. One of the dwarves who had left after dinner to stand guard at the entrance to the mines returned with a bloody gash over his right eye. “Shadewatch. Four of them,” he managed. “They stumbled into one of the tunnels by accident. Thorn and Davok are holding them off.”

Sencha had already grabbed for her kit while across the cavern, people reached for their weapons and got to their feet. It looked like a well-structured response, and the sudden array of blades shimmered in the magical glow.

Vax saw his chance. He palmed his blades, and Sencha placed a hand on his arm. “This isn’t your fight,” she warned.

“I know.” It didn’t stop him. And this time, no one else did either.